The FBI Wednesday announced the arrest of three men it alleges planned to help the Islamic State, news that at first appeared to confirm fears that radical extremism is spreading to the United States.
“The flow of foreign fighters to Syria represents an evolving threat to our country and to our allies,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a press release announcing the arrests. “We will vigorously prosecute those who attempt to travel to Syria to wage violent jihad on behalf of ISIL and those who support them.”
Left unmentioned in the FBI statement, however, is the integral role a paid informant appears to have played in generating the charges against the men, and helping turn a fantastical “plot” into something even remotely tangible. It appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.
On Feb. 25, two Brooklyn men were arrested following FBI and New York Police Department anti-terror raids and charged with providing “material support” to the Islamic State. Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, and Akhror Saidakhmetov 19, are alleged to have made arrangements to travel to Syria, and also to have expressed willingness to conduct attacks in the United States “if ordered to do so” by the group. A third man, Abror Habibov, 30, was arrested in Florida and charged with helping provide financial support for their travel plans.
According to the criminal complaint against the three, the FBI first began investigating Juraboev after he made postings on Uzbek-language social media sites in August 2014 praising the Islamic State and offering to pledge allegiance to them. While these postings were made anonymously, Juraboev neglected to conceal his IP address which led to him being quickly identified by authorities.
On Aug. 15, 2014, Juraboev was visited at a Brooklyn residence by FBI agents; he openly expressed his desire to join Islamic State to them. He is said to have told the agents he desired to travel and join the group, but that “he currently lacked the means to go there.” Juraboev is also said to have told the FBI agents in this interview of his desire to kill President Obama, but stated that he does not have any “means or imminent plans to do so.”
Three days after that initial visit, FBI agents visited him again; he reiterated these violent and criminal desires, stating his willingness to kill President Obama if he were ordered to do so by any member of Islamic State, and also telling the agents he was willing to “plant a bomb on Coney Island if so ordered by ISIL”.
In the interviews, Juraboev also mentioned Saidakhmetov, 19, as someone who shared his basic views and desire to travel to areas controlled by the Islamic State. Transcripts of a recorded conversation between the two in mid-September show them apparently expressing their desire to travel to Syria via Istanbul, and trying to determine logistics of the trip. Juraboev also apparently communicated at this time with people online to discuss the feasibility of traveling to Syria and joining the Islamic State.
Shortly after this, the FBI introduced them to a confidential informant, who “approached Juraboev at a mosque, while posing as an ideologically sympathetic individual, and met Saidakhmetov the same day.” The informant befriended the two men, who told him of their desire to go to Syria. According to the criminal complaint, the informant was paid for his services and was perceived by the defendants to be an “older and more experienced person.”
In a recorded discussion on Sept. 24, Saidakhmetov told the informant his plans had been halted as his mother had taken his passport away to prevent him from traveling. A transcript of this discussion describes the informant suggesting possible routes that Saidakhmetov could take to reach Syria, after which the two went to watch videos of Islamic State training camps together.
Over the next several months the informant evidently developed a relationship of trust with both Juraboev and Saidakhmetov, even possibly moving into an apartment with Juraboev, and convincing both of them that he intended to travel to Syria and join Islamic State. During this time, other ideas were also floated, including potentially joining the U.S. Army to become double agents, something that was ultimately dismissed as impractical.
Though Juraboev in his initial FBI interviews said he lacked the financial means to travel, he obtained, after meeting the informant, enough money to purchase tickets for airfare to Istanbul near the end of 2014. Saidakhmetov, whose passport had been confiscated by his mother, at one point asked the informant to help him fill out new travel documents and even forge his signature, which the informant “advised Saidakhmetov [he] did”.
Juraboev and Saidakhmetov then made arrangements to travel to Turkey and from there cross the border into Syria. Throughout this time, they continued to believe that the informant was also buying tickets and traveling with them to join the Islamic State.
Habibov, the oldest defendant at age 30, is alleged to have provided funds to pay for Saidakhmetov’s trip and to have inquired about the potential of finding further support for him once he arrived in Syria. Habibov also is alleged to have asked about the potential of providing contacts for “another brother who appears to be smarter” but who also lacks connections. This “smarter brother,” as the complaint indicates, is in fact a reference to the FBI informant.
Despite his efforts, there is no indication Habibov succeeded in procuring any contacts for either of the travelers.
Saidakhmetov was arrested on Feb. 25 at JFK airport in New York as he arrived to board his flight to Istanbul. In the run-up to his arrest, he had also allegedly proposed a plan to gain control cockpit and “[divert] the plane to the Islamic State, so that the Islamic State would gain a plane.” Juraboev, not scheduled to leave for Turkey until March 29, and Habibov, were also arrested on the same day at separate locations.
Since the time that FBI agents first made contact with Juraboev in August 2014, a total of seven months elapsed until the arrests were made. During this time, the group stayed under close surveillance, and an informant was introduced who was evidently older and considered to be “more experienced” by the defendants.
Crucially, it appears that only after the introduction of the informant did any actual arrangements to commit a criminal act come into existence.
It stands to reason that during this extended time period, particularly after a seemingly unhinged Juraboev openly expressed his violent and criminal fantasies to FBI agents, other tactics of intervention could have been taken to prevent he and Saidakhmetov from going down this path.
The covert informant under the direction of the FBI evidently helped encourage the two toward terrorism over the course of these months. Instead of dissuading them, the informant went so far as to watch recruitment videos with the 19-year old Saidakhmetov and help him make his travel documents.
A 2011 study conducted by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley found that of 508 post-9/11 terrorism defendants, “Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money,” with operatives being paid as much as $100,000 per assignment. Of the sting operations that resulted in terrorism arrests, nearly a third are believed to have been led by an agent provocateur in the employ of the FBI.
In one conversation recorded in the criminal complaint, Habibov asked an unnamed third party about Juraboev’s mental state. “Yes, I think he is normal. I am just saying . . . I don’t know,” the unnamed person responded. “He didn’t take any precautions. He just blurted out without hesitation.”
Photo:Mary Altaffer/AP
Jul 4, 2013 FBI’s 30 Year Mafia Crime Spree | Interview with Peter Lance
Abby Martin talks to Peter Lance, award winning investigator and author of ‘Deal with the Devil’, about the relationship between the FBI and the Mafia’s Gregory Scarpa, who over the span of 30 years committed multiple crimes including murder, all while being paid upwards of 1 million dollars by the FBI.
http://youtu.be/NomqUWXv7YU
Jul. 22, 2014 Human Rights Watch: ‘All of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations’
http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/22/human-rights-watch-all-of-the-high-profi
I’m confused. I thought if a person or organization aided and abetted the commission of a crime, that the same person or organization is guilty of a crime. Call it entrapment or complicity, the FBI is so busy creating strawmen to take down that when the real attacks hit they are caught completely off guard. I feel safer, sure I do.
Well…imagine that. If the FBI didn’t mastermind, recruit and fund its own “terrorist” plots, they’d be out of a job. There are many disturbing things about this FBI trend to paint themselves as heroes, some of them are obvious but some are less so. Such as the chaos and destruction they leave behind among the families of the patsies they set up so they can paint themselves as heroes. The more I know this system, the more disgusted I feel.
***
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” ~ 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Describing the “Two Minutes Hate”, Part 1, Chapter 1.
Thanks for this article. The humane, productive way to handle the matter would not have involved a months-long campaign of deceit and scaling up this Asperbergs punk’s confusion. The FBI said in its last memo they were committed to defaulting to a scaled down approach that involves communities. This should have happened here for at least plan A: involving the mother and community – the leaders at the mosque, etc. The pattern we see here with the informant bears a kind of sinister laziness that ultimately tears communities down and makes the job more complex.
Shouldn’t the arrest the entire bar here for anti-semetism under these laws?
https://www.youtube.com/v/Vb3IMTJjzfo
Oh wait, they’re not Muslim, therefore they can’t hate Jews.
So, if I understand this story and the charges against the Brooklyn 3, they are being charged with giving “material support” to ISIS? However, they didn’t have the means to do so until the government, via the FBI and its informant, provided them wi the means: money to buy tickets to travel? In other words, the government is actually providing them with material support, which they previously did not have, and they charging them for providing the material suuport to ISIS.
Pretty much.
I don’t have a problem with how an informant was used in this case. Any guy who is brazen/stupid enough to tell the FBI face to face what this guy did is somebody who should be off the streets. What are we supposed to do, wait until he finds the means to act and then say “Oh, we knew about him, but it was only talk at the time.” Can you “deprogram” him somehow? I don’t know, but I don’t want to take the risk with somebody who is so committed, they tell the FBI that they would kill the president if ordered to do so. There are too many cases where informants are cheerleaders enticing people who otherwise would not do anything. This is not like those cases.
I’m happy the FBI did this. You have people in the country who openly express a willingness to carry out terrorist attacks in the US. I’m happy they’re behind bars. Are we supposed to wait until after a Charlie Hebdo incident?
note to self..file under ..
Let’s try Dolt’s for $2k.
Twit..
‘@MazMHussain what is it about that section that makes you think he’s mentally ill?’ -Heather Tomlinson
https://twitter.com/HeatherTomli/status/570750018489098242
ht `jimmy legs (aka `jammer)
To think they are the same people investigating whether chapel hill shooting was a hate crime or not.
The Mother Jones study says almost half, but it sure seems like every US terrorism story has similar origins.
Maybe it’s just all the ones in the news where the FBI pats themselves on the back vigorously.
“similar origins”… I’m having trouble finding a single major incident in history that isn’t from this origin. Likewise if anyone thinks they don’t have an end game to all of this, you’re dead wrong. From our mysteriously slow, and inadequate pace in dealing with this I’d encourage sounding the alarm. Everyone’s eventually next on their list.
“Everyone’s eventually next on their list.”
Yep. Compliance or else.
Indeed.
Perhaps a closer look at the methodology used by Mother Jones is necessary? (not my cup of tea)
They seem to be expressing concern, but end up seemingly downplaying the true nature of the beast.
We have to lose our liberties because we are at existential risk from the mentally retarded, mentally ill, who can’t even care for themselves?
Didn’t the Nazis shut down democracy, supposedly because the Reichstag had been threatened by a mentally challenged homeless Jewish man, which was actually the government’s own manufactured plot?
I guess we’ve learned a lot from those post WWII secret collaborations with former Nazis that were recently exposed.
I burst out laughing at the part about one of these fearsome terrorists having been foiled when his mother took away his passport. Maybe the mother should be teaching classes at the FBI Academy on how to foil terrorists.
appreciate how The Intercept tenaciously covers the entrapment stories. nice work.
respectfully, suggest inserting “of the” between “control” and “cockpit,” deleting one of the “actuals” in the paragraph beginning “Crucially,” and … carefully reconsider how best to express the sentiment the “It stands to reason…” paragraph trips over its own effort to communicate.
FBI always knows where to find its informants,
someone they know is in trouble with the law.
And they pay them,
and give a break on their own sentencing.
Once again, tax dollars are spent on entrapping individuals not smart enough to turn down a bet to lick a steel lamppost in the middle of an arctic freeze.
Clearly, these people are a greater danger to themselves than anyone else.
The Beast. The AntiChrist. New king of a Greater State of Israel which will be in fact the New World Order. Author of 9/11. Master of Deception. Only CIA director to also become US president. Inventor of Al Qaeda and ISIS. Author of the largest robberies in history from “Savings and Loan” like also for the last one of 2.3 trillion dollar stolen the day before 9/11. Father of Jeb Bush, second son to become US president. George H. Bush has unchallenged powers also because his worst enemy, the concept of Equality (promoted by the assassinated JFK), remains largely confused in the minds of all people.
Our cultures have all been influenced by Religions that still today demonstrate how to live in a pyramidal system which is made of casts, from priests to Popes.
The same pyramidal system applied by the Animal kingdom is also the only system adopted by all “Human” societies. This has accustomed the people to live without mutual Respect and to coexist within a system of subordination and mental slavery.
Although, a New World Order will be the natural end game for a Humankind that continues to believe in the Law of Strength, the alternative is a drastic change and repudiation of that single Animal Law.
It takes a leap from the Animal platform and a new view of ourselves.
http://www.wavevolution.org/en/humanwaves.html
SPAM
How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now, the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington Saturday 25 September 2004. George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar